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Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, which emphasizes external success, Brooks challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "résumé virtues" -- achieving wealth, fame, and status -- and our "eulogy virtues," those that exist at the core of our being: kindness, bravery, honesty, or faithfulness, focusing on what kind of relationships we have formed. Looking to some of the worlds greatest thinkers and inspiring...

"We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don't have enough of it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In [this book], Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far...

Drawing from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history and education, one of the nation's leading writers and commentators helps us become more understanding considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen.

In this book the author reverses three decades of thinking about what creates successful children, solving the mysteries of why some succeed and others fail, and of how to move individual children toward their full potential for success. The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in this book the author argues that the...

Poses a case against organized religion that documents the myriad ways in which religion reflects human agendas and distorts sexuality and the perception of the origins of the universe, in a science-based analysis that considers the benefits of a secular world of the "Old" Testament -- The "New" Testament exceeds the evil of the "Old" one -- The Koran is borrowed from both Jewish and Christian myths -- The tawdriness of the miraculous and the decline...

An introduction to key sociology topics, including poverty, gender, class, and crime.

"Part memoir, part historical and social analysis, J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is a fascinating consideration of class, culture, and the American dream. Vance's grandparents were "dirt poor and in love." They got married and moved north from Kentucky to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. Their grandchild (the author) graduated from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving upward mobility for...